BPN816: Cytokine Fast Detection

Project ID

BPN816

Website

Start Date

Wed 2016-Jan-06 18:50:07

Last Updated

Mon 2018-Jan-29 10:23:56

Abstract

Sepsis is a life-threatening condition both in civilian and military medical scenarios. Patients with sepsis usually
exhibit a vigorous systemic release of cytokines such as interleukin-1 (IL-1), interleukin-6 (IL-6) and tumor necrosis
factor (TNF) into serum. The ability to monitor relative cytokine levels continuously at fast time scales (tens of
minutes) could open the door to closed-loop, patient-specific sepsis management therapies. The current methods
of cytokine detection take hours and cost thousands of dollars because the physiological concentration is so low
around femtomolar. At such low concentrations, the limiting factor becomes mass transport instead of binding
kinetics, due to increased diffusion length from bulk solution to sensor surface. We present a method, based on
nanofabrication and ion concentration polarization (ICP) which enriches analytes using only a DC power supply.